I know it's popular to hate on modern art, and your post will be the most upvoted (and I upvoted you too, so that my response would be more visible), but I want to offer an alternative view.
Art is about the artist attempting to generate an emotional response in an audience. Books, painting, music, are all there to create joy, sadness, melancholy, laughter, suspense, excitement.
Human emotions are universal, which is the beauty of art.
But humans themselves are not. What one person finds funny, another finds disgusting. What one finds sad, another finds pathetic. Which is why we need so many genres of art.
This is why we need both Classical Music, and Heavy Metal, and Country. Dramas and Comedies.
But what happens when art ceases to generate an emotional response? Does it even have value?
This is what happened to the classical art world at the turn of the impressionism. Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. And besides, photo-realistic representations of scenery was about to be improved and replaced with...photography.
So the artists went back to the drawing board, started challenging the status quo, and came up with Impressionism. Cubism. And a million other *isms that I, an uneducated rube, can't even begin to name or speak about with competency.
But each one isn't meant to be universal, to generate an emotional response in the audience. You can walk through a museum, and see a 100 paintings, and feel nothing. And that's okay! What's worth it is the one painting you see that causes you to feel something. Then it worked.
"Modern art" (which itself can be exploded into a million different categories falls into a bit of that. And it simply cannot be appreciated with a simple low-resolution gif on a monitor.
For one, it sits on the context of what came before. It responds to art that preceded it. You can get mad about that and think it should stand on it's own, but consider how much of mass media depends on an implicit understanding of the culture and what preceded it.
For another, it's frequently a 3 dimensional medium. Seeing the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting must be seen in person to truly marvel at the incredible ability to make something appear out of nothing ("This brush stroke is a dog. It's clearly a dog. but when you look up close, it's just a single simple brush stroke.")
Finally, and this brings me full circle to your point, sometimes you need to actively place yourself into a position to feel something.
Consider the difference between listening to a new song on earbuds on a loud subway train, vs on high quality headphones on your beanbag chair at home alone, vs with an audience in a magnificent concert hall. Your emotional response is going to be entirely different.
So when you see something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change.", you could default to "Wow, whoever painted this must be a giant gasbag".
You could scoff and say "My 4 year old niece could have painted that, and I wouldn't put it on my fridge"
You could say "What does this millennial know about the role of art as a medium for change."
Or you could stop, clear your head, and actually think about the words. How do you feel about society? How does the art before you make you feel? How does it feel to stand on the shoulders of giants?"
Maybe you'll feel nothing and move along, and that's okay.
But maybe you'll actually get some insights or an emotional repsonse from the piece, which is what the author hoped you would.
I agree with everything you've said. However, many people I know who produce art, are not thinking in these terms, and resent being forced to do so, and they are forced to do so, by the commercial reality of the fine art industry. Furthermore, if someone is trying to find meaning in the word salad I produced in about 90 seconds, I wish them luck, because whatever meaning is there exists entirely in their own head. I suspect the same is true for a great many (not all) descriptions of modern art.
What I'm asking of you is to be less cynical about what actual art and artists and be genuine in the search for meaning.
If you don't find it - no harm.
Also, the meaning in the author's own head is irrelevant. Death of the author. You can find your own. Maybe their guidance and perspective helps there, maybe not.
"What I'm asking of you is to be less cynical about what actual art and artists and be genuine in the search for meaning."
There's a typo here, and I honestly am not sure what you're trying to say. I will say this: I am not a modern art hater. Far from it, I love modern art, and I go well out of my way to enjoy it. My complaint is entirely with the ham handed descriptions of pieces that require no descriptions at all.
You're right, I definitely accidentally a word there, may be several.
Ironically, I DO hate most modern art, and the treatise I wrote out is a description of my own journey, and what I frequently have to consciously remind myself to allow myself to experience and feel things that I don't have an immediate connection to.
Totally get what you said IF the artists of this day and age weren't shilling for money. If it was pure art that was an expression of their self, sure, I agree it's art. But peddling mediocre crap for large sums of money should be equated to trash.
Most of the discussions around modern art is around who sells for the most amount of money. It's a numbers game, gaming galleries which exist for no other reason than to peddle crap possibly for tax reasons, and con artists posing as real artists...
I agree with everything here except the suggestion of trying to find meaning in International Art English, which is abstruse, opaque, hifalutin, and divides The Anointed Ones of Art from the (they would say--but they wouldn't say) unwashed masses _by design_.
International Art English is, from a virtue ethics standpoint, a pure waste of time and pure crap.
> Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer.
I don't think that follows at all. My favourite cafe has almost perfected my morning Americano, but that's exactly why I enjoy going there. The TV series that provoked the strongest emotional response in me wasn't doing something nonrepresentational, it was doing exactly the list of tropes that you'd expect to provoke that emotion, just executed in a really polished way.
And even - especially - if we talk about pictures, there have been plenty of representational works that left me awestruck by their beauty. Look at, say, Sparth's spaceships (which couldn't possibly be replaced by photographs, even though they're "photorealistic" in some sense). Heck, look at Luis Royo, or the dragons on my college friend's deviantart. Even if you just want to talk about photorealistic oil paintings, take a look at the aeroplanes and board meetings in the China Art Museum and tell me those don't make you feel something. The things that people found beautiful and inspiring and provocative for centuries can still be all those things, and the idea that everything that can be done with representational, conventionally beautiful artwork has been is as absurd as the idea that everything worth doing in fine dining or orchestral music or classical ballet has been done.
Humans are good at pulling meaning out of noise, even when there's no actual meaning there - consider rain dances, or the face of Jesus on a shower curtain. Of course ambiguity has always been a part of art - the famous Mona Lisa smile, or a lot of poetry rests on things that can be taken in different ways by the reader. I'm sure it's possible to look at a random pattern of brush strokes and have a meaningful emotional response - heck, I'm pretty sure I've done it myself. But surely there should be some equivalent of a double-blind test; art that performs no better than a placebo should not be considered as art, just like in any other field. And I'm convinced a lot of modern art would fail that test - e.g. Damien Hirst tells a story of how he tried to deliberately do one of his spin paintings badly, but ended up with one that was indistinguishable from the others. All of the art forms I talked about in the previous paragraph have a better hit rate at provoking interesting emotions and insights than modern art (and I don't think it's just a matter of accessibility - classical ballet takes a fair bit of effort to be able to appreciate it fully). So it seems crazy that the art world is so exclusively, overwhelmingly focused on non-representational, looks-like-random-noise works.
If modern art really was just a scam, what would you expect to be different? What would it take to convince you that there's no there there?
Art is about the artist attempting to generate an emotional response in an audience. Books, painting, music, are all there to create joy, sadness, melancholy, laughter, suspense, excitement.
Human emotions are universal, which is the beauty of art.
But humans themselves are not. What one person finds funny, another finds disgusting. What one finds sad, another finds pathetic. Which is why we need so many genres of art.
This is why we need both Classical Music, and Heavy Metal, and Country. Dramas and Comedies.
But what happens when art ceases to generate an emotional response? Does it even have value?
This is what happened to the classical art world at the turn of the impressionism. Classic "Renaissance"-style painting styles perfected the human form to the point that there was nothing exciting any more about the form. Nothing stimulating the viewer. And besides, photo-realistic representations of scenery was about to be improved and replaced with...photography.
So the artists went back to the drawing board, started challenging the status quo, and came up with Impressionism. Cubism. And a million other *isms that I, an uneducated rube, can't even begin to name or speak about with competency.
But each one isn't meant to be universal, to generate an emotional response in the audience. You can walk through a museum, and see a 100 paintings, and feel nothing. And that's okay! What's worth it is the one painting you see that causes you to feel something. Then it worked.
"Modern art" (which itself can be exploded into a million different categories falls into a bit of that. And it simply cannot be appreciated with a simple low-resolution gif on a monitor.
For one, it sits on the context of what came before. It responds to art that preceded it. You can get mad about that and think it should stand on it's own, but consider how much of mass media depends on an implicit understanding of the culture and what preceded it.
For another, it's frequently a 3 dimensional medium. Seeing the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting must be seen in person to truly marvel at the incredible ability to make something appear out of nothing ("This brush stroke is a dog. It's clearly a dog. but when you look up close, it's just a single simple brush stroke.")
Finally, and this brings me full circle to your point, sometimes you need to actively place yourself into a position to feel something.
Consider the difference between listening to a new song on earbuds on a loud subway train, vs on high quality headphones on your beanbag chair at home alone, vs with an audience in a magnificent concert hall. Your emotional response is going to be entirely different.
So when you see something like "Opus #4, in mixed media. Through a re-imagining of the interaction between form and light, the artist challenges our preconceived notions regarding the interplay of history, science, and religion, transgressing the boundaries imposed by our own engagement in a patriarchal society, and forcing us to reconsider the role of art as a medium for change.", you could default to "Wow, whoever painted this must be a giant gasbag".
You could scoff and say "My 4 year old niece could have painted that, and I wouldn't put it on my fridge"
You could say "What does this millennial know about the role of art as a medium for change."
Or you could stop, clear your head, and actually think about the words. How do you feel about society? How does the art before you make you feel? How does it feel to stand on the shoulders of giants?"
Maybe you'll feel nothing and move along, and that's okay.
But maybe you'll actually get some insights or an emotional repsonse from the piece, which is what the author hoped you would.